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scott523 said:
Question: Is there any extra benefit to getting iWork in addition to the MS Office for Mac I'm getting? $50 for iWork is really cheap and I have no problems adding it as a preinstall.

Actually you should be able to get it for $10 cheaper when you get to school. I use both MS office and iWork. For me, iWork is a great tool for creating presentations (leagues beyond powerpoint) and layouts that take advantage of pages built-in newsletter and flyer designs. Every time I show someone one of the docs I created with iWork, there's always a big "wow" factor. :D
 
scott523 said:
Question: Is there any extra benefit to getting iWork in addition to the MS Office for Mac I'm getting? $50 for iWork is really cheap and I have no problems adding it as a preinstall.

While i don't have any personall experience, I have seen people opine that Keynote smokes Powerpoint as presentation software goes.
 
Keynote beats the pants off of PowerPoint, and if you're prepared to learn a non-Word approach to word processing, I think you'll probably prefer Pages in the long run. For $50 you can't go wrong, unless $50 happens to be a lot of money to you at the moment.
 
Another question:

To my knowledge, I know Word documents (.doc) can be migrated over to Pages2. But can a Pages2 document format migrate back to MS Word (Windows)?
 
scott523 said:
Another question:

To my knowledge, I know Word documents (.doc) can be migrated over to Pages2. But can a Pages2 document format migrate back to MS Word (Windows)?
Ok was that a stupid question? or nobody wanna give me at least a one word answer?
 
sushi said:
One important consideration, is whether or not you need to interface with others using Word, Excel or PowerPoint documents.

If you think there may be a need to do this then I would go with Office for the compatibility.

I can't emphasize this point enough. If you are in a business environment and interacting with other Office users (who are most likely to be Windows/Office users), you can't afford to be in a position where you have to explain why the document you've just sent them doesn't look exactly right on their machine. The document recipient isn't going to be bothered with technical explanations, that's not their job nor their problem.

One of the features of Office for the Mac is that it isn't just capable of producing stuff in .doc format, etc., the suite is designed to be cross-platform with Windows users and Mac users so Office docs can be freely exchanged and revised without issues. If producing basic, simple documents in .doc format is all that's required, and there is little likelihood of further collaboration (editing, revising) with other Windows Office users, then there are alternatives that might fit the bill. But anything above and beyond that is going to require Office for the Mac or some very creative, entertaining explanations about the appearance of the document you sent versus the one you received.
 
VanNess said:
I can't emphasize this point enough. If you are in a business environment and interacting with other Office users (who are most likely to be Windows/Office users), you can't afford to be in a position where you have to explain why the document you've just sent them doesn't look exactly right on their machine. The document recipient isn't going to be bothered with technical explanations, that's not their job nor their problem.

One of the features of Office for the Mac is that it isn't just capable of producing stuff in .doc format, etc., the suite is designed to be cross-platform with Windows users and Mac users so Office docs can be freely exchanged and revised without issues. If producing basic, simple documents in .doc format is all that's required, and there is little likelihood of further collaboration (editing, revising) with other Windows Office users, then there are alternatives that might fit the bill. But anything above and beyond that is going to require Office for the Mac or some very creative, entertaining explanations about the appearance of the document you sent versus the one you received.

This is something of an over-statement of the issues IMO. For one thing, the perfect "compatibility" of Word documents across platforms and versions is essentially mythical. For perfect compatibility, everyone involved must be using the same version of Word on the same platform and have same fonts installed on their computers. Of course this is way too much to expect.

In every case I have personally experienced, one person in a collaboration situation is responsible for the production of the final finished document. If this person has even the remotest idea what they are doing, they are reformatting the document using whatever word processor they prefer to have a consist look. Otherwise, the document is going to be a mess, no matter whether everyone who contributed to it was using Word or not. In fact if I'm heading a collaboration the last thing I want to receive is a heavily formatted Word document. I've seen these with literally dozens of paragraph and text styles. Some of them are such a formatting mess, I've been forced to convert them to plain text and format from scratch.

Everybody using Word makes collaboration easier -- is that ever an overrated concept!
 
I too have had no luck with true collaboration of word documents either from mac->pc, pc->mac, mac->mac, or pc->pc. Something always gets changed.



scott523 said:
Ok was that a stupid question? or nobody wanna give me at least a one word answer?

"patience" :)
 
Maybe IJ Reilly and I should get together and write an iWork vs. Office sticky one of these days; that might help head off these threads that keep sprouting up....


...but even with that I think it's hopeless.
 
gauchogolfer said:
Maybe IJ Reilly and I should get together and write an iWork vs. Office sticky one of these days; that might help head off these threads that keep sprouting up....


...but even with that I think it's hopeless.

I'm game. They call me the King of Hopeless Causes. ;)
 
gauchogolfer said:
Word cannot open Pages files, but Pages can open and export to Word.
In this case, I'll just get iWork and ditch MS Office for the first time. My university and my home desktop has Windows stuff but I guess saving/moving different files shouldn't be a problem for me. $150 is kinda pricey when I'm on a $2,000 budget. Even though I found $50 rebate from CompUSA, $100 for Excel and Word (Keynote owns PP) isn't worth it.
 
I dont understand all the dissatisfaction that previous posters seem to be having with Office 2004 :confused:

This app is hands down better that iWork. Its not even a race! And trust me, I have both; last year I thought I just had to get iWork for some wierd reason. Keynote is nice, Pages is mediocre. And Keynote isnt even that much better than Powerpoint. I think you'd get more out of Pages for doing image intensive stuff such as Newsletters, Journals, Recipes, etc (does it even have a template for a paper??)

Word to the wise. I have both apps (albeit iWork '05), trust me, you dont wanna use Pages to do your papers. Trust me. But if you can, go ahead and get both. There is an Education version of Office:Mac and you should totally jump on that.

EDIT: I just checked - Pages does have a template for a 'Term Paper'. But its not quite the same thing...
 
brepublican said:
This app is hands down better that iWork. Its not even a race!

You've got to love it when someone makes an unqualified statement like this and provides absolutely zero justification, no explanation or backup for their opinion of any kind!

You've apparently missed the fact that Pages allows users to create custom templates, from scratch or based on another template. This is one of the application's main strengths. I've hardly ever used one of the canned templates, but I have created a number of them. Templates -- one of the reasons I prefer Pages to Word.
 
brepublican said:
Word to the wise. I have both apps (albeit iWork '05), trust me, you dont wanna use Pages to do your papers.

iWork 06 is a major upgrade over 05, with much better performance for Pages and some key upgrades for Keynote (which wipes PPT right off the map, btw). I'd suggest taking a look at it.
 
brepublican said:
..... Word to the wise. I have both apps (albeit iWork '05), trust me, you dont wanna use Pages to do your papers. Trust me. But if you can, go ahead and get both. There is an Education version of Office:Mac and you should totally jump on that.....

Probably best not to trust you in this case, like I said I used Pages to complete several term papers (a few of which were very comprehensive manuals) and Pages performed effortlessly. In the case I had to provide electronic format I simply converted it to pdf. In any case my papers looked far better than similar ones by other students who used Word.
 
I've been using Pages for the last few days as part of the 30 day trial that came with iLife '06. (I've had it for a long time, but never had a need to use it).

In my opinion, Pages is not competing directly with Word. Pages is more like a consumer (yet still powerful) version of Adobe InDesign. It's a layout program.

I've used it (with great success and little learning curve) to make some brochures/advertisements for my job, and I think it's great and infinitely better at that type of thing than trying to do the same thing in MS Word.

However, for straight text writing--and I speak here as an English major--Word has Pages beat. Pages indeed seems to not be able to keep up with my typing, and the features that make it great for layout and design make it a little strange sometimes for word processing.

So essentially, they're not the same things, and yes, it is worth having both installed. Heck, I even have NeoOffice installed--which saved my butt the other day when I had an issue with an Excel file that couldn't be fixed (for various stupid reasons) in MS Excel.
 
You don't need the MS Word front end to write papers. Just use Textedit.

I promise you that a .txt file will look exactly the same on whatever platform you might need to send it to.

Of course, my vote is still for LaTeX with BibTeX. Direct output to PDF for the win.
 
Cameront9 said:
I've been using Pages for the last few days as part of the 30 day trial that came with iLife '06. (I've had it for a long time, but never had a need to use it).

In my opinion, Pages is not competing directly with Word. Pages is more like a consumer (yet still powerful) version of Adobe InDesign. It's a layout program.

I've used it (with great success and little learning curve) to make some brochures/advertisements for my job, and I think it's great and infinitely better at that type of thing than trying to do the same thing in MS Word.

However, for straight text writing--and I speak here as an English major--Word has Pages beat. Pages indeed seems to not be able to keep up with my typing, and the features that make it great for layout and design make it a little strange sometimes for word processing.

So essentially, they're not the same things, and yes, it is worth having both installed. Heck, I even have NeoOffice installed--which saved my butt the other day when I had an issue with an Excel file that couldn't be fixed (for various stupid reasons) in MS Excel.

I concur, that Pages can lag if you're a particularly fast typist using it on a relatively slow machine. I don't know if it's the page layout capabilities that create this issue, though I suspect not. Either way, Apple needs to fix this if Pages is going to gain more acceptance. However, I don't agree that Pages isn't a word processor, unless we have to accept a very dogmatic definition of word processing (e.g., it has to look and work like MS Word and handle graphics poorly, like Word). I write for a living. Pages has been my everyday word processor for nearly two years now and I have few issues with it in this role. I'm not sure what else to say in response to the suggestion that Pages isn't really a word processor.
 
NeoOffice...its free, open source, and the new one is really look good...at least try it. My brother just replace MS Office with NeoOffice, and its also Universal, so it will run much faster then Office.

If it comes down to Office vs iWork, I'd get iWork.
 
Comparing the two:

Word:pages
Unless you are a heavy Word user, Pages should give you all the features you need and more, including the ability to do some seriously sexy page layout stuff that Word just doesn't do. Even TextEdit does quite a fine job of opening and saving basic Word docs.

PowerPoint:Keynote
No contest. Keynote creates gorgeous cinema-quality stuff and is quite nice to use. PowerPoint looks and feels gross in comparison.

Excel:?
No standalone spreadsheet app in iWork but both Keynote and Pages do have charts and tables complete with customizable calculations. I've found them to be plenty for my needs.

Entourage:Mail
MS Office will give you Entourage but if you are already using Mail/iCal/Address Book then this might be a unused application for you. Personally I prefer the Apple apps because of their tight integration with each other and the rest of the OS.
 
zap2 said:
NeoOffice...its free, open source, and the new one is really look good...at least try it. My brother just replace MS Office with NeoOffice, and its also Universal, so it will run much faster then Office.

If it comes down to Office vs iWork, I'd get iWork.
NeoOffice may be a universal but its also written in Java, so it may not be any faster the Office. I haven't tried it myself but one of the complaints I've seen posted about Neo is its kind of slow.

I've got some free time this weekend so I just might fire up the trial version of iWorks and give it a try.

I've found the postings about using Word/Pages for writing papers interesting. I'm back in school and seems like I'm writing a paper every few weeks. Two reasons that I'm using Word.
1.I have a template that will format my paper in the APA format that my school requires. It may be possible to create such a format in Pages, so I'll have to look into that.
2.The finite math class I'll be taking requires the use of MS Equation Editor.
 
brepublican said:
Word to the wise. I have both apps (albeit iWork '05), trust me, you dont wanna use Pages to do your papers. Trust me. But if you can, go ahead and get both. There is an Education version of Office:Mac and you should totally jump on that.
I use both programs and for creating the business letter, proposal, and other type of document creation, I end up using Office 2004. With PowerPC Mac, Office 2004 is good program. The good compatibility with Windows-based Word/Excel is one of the main features I like most.

I usually use Pages for light document work or page layout with the copy made by other document creation program (such as Office, TextEdit, or etc). For heavy duty typing, Pages is not fast enough to keep up with my typing. With Word, I have not had this type of lag at all.

For me, paying for Office 2004 is a small change and I have not regretted buying this program as I used it every single day and helped me with higher productivity with good file compatibility with Windows based Word/Excel (Office 2003 Suite).

As far as Keynote vs. PowerPoint, I prefer Keynote. Doing a presentation with Keynote is a fresh air in the PowerPoint-infested corporate world. I use both Keynote and PowerPoint. If I am doing my own presentation, I will use Keynote. If I am working with my colleagues to create the slides, I use PowerPoint.
 
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